Filaria - Brent Hayward [76]
She straightened to push at her back with the palm of her free hand, so that Tran so finally saw her features: she was gorgeous. As he had sensed. So beautiful that he caught his breath and his eyes moistened with longing —
“Just you wait a minute,” the trolley said. “Let me adjust the lavender ratio.”
Evidently, the trolley was some form of minor god. Tran so had not seen the likes of it before. But the trolley was not the speaker he had heard earlier, the one with the child’s voice. There was someone else in the room. Human, or god? He wished he could see more than just a rectangle of the chamber below, wished he could see more of the girl —
“Freeze, sir.”
In that instant, with these two words, the mystery of the third voice, and of who — or what — owned it, was solved. And he comprehended, in that same instant, why the voice had sounded familiar. This time, it had not issued from beneath him. Before he looked up, across the grille, to the other side of the duct, he knew the voice belonged to a crawling god. Out of context, but unmistakable. Funny how his mind hadn’t made the connection earlier. Preoccupied with the girl, perhaps.
He lifted his face.
There were two of them. Identical to gods of loose ends and traffic infringements, squatting there, in the duct opposite, they watched him intently with their compound eyes.
“Hello,” he said.
“Who are you? What are you doing here?”
Deciding to tell the truth — or at least, the partial truth — Tran so Phengh said, “I am seeking answers to questions.”
“Questions? What questions?” The crawling god on the left scuttled closer so that one pointed leg, glittering in the light rising up from the sleeping chamber, rested on the brink of the grille. “To me, friend, you appear to be spying on my staff.”
“Your staff?” Again, Tran so Phengh looked down at the girl, whose face was upturned now, listening. His gaze fell into those eyes: beautiful and warm and brown.
When he reluctantly lifted his head again, to explain, the crawling gods had gone. Silently vanished. Squinting, he tried to locate the deities as they ran off down the dark tunnel —
There came a popping sound.
And the duct fell out from underneath him.
Tumbling once through the air, glancing off the softness of the bed, he crashed heavily onto the brown shag carpet. On his back, he lay in pain at the girl’s feet in a settling cloud of dust and pattering debris.
She smiled at him.
He groaned. After a moment, he moved his arms, his legs. As he lay there, trying to breathe, reassured that no bones were broken, that incredible face kept looking down at him. Smiling.
Crawling gods came across the floor toward him, from an open doorway. At least six of them. They held position in a semi-circle around him as he managed to sit up.
“You could have killed me,” Tran so wheezed, glancing toward the ceiling panel through which he had fallen: it swung, creaking, back and forth on its hinges. Another crawling god clung upside down to the tiled ceiling. As he watched, this deity vanished, moving swiftly into the hole and out of sight, dislodging detritus with its scrambling legs; something sharp landed painfully in Tran so’s left eye and he groaned once more.
“You are trespassing,” one of the crawling gods explained. “This area is for paid guests only. And staff, of course. But not just any staff. This is not a free-for-all. We run a tight ship here in the Department of Hospitality. Go tell your boss that.”
Tran so rubbed at his injured eye. “Hospitality? You don’t know the meaning of the word. And I don’t have a boss.”
“Renegade, eh? Well you are interrupting our new employee training. It sure seems you missed yours, in whatever third-rate department you skulked away from.”
“I am not a new employee,” the girl said, bemusement flickering across her face. She glanced coyly at Tran so. “There are no new employees, sir. I’ve been doing this job since I